The most terrible poverty is loneliness
by EternityisOver
Summary: 'Why did you do it' Dean asks. Sam flinches. He doesn't want to have this conversation. Not now, not ever. Because nothing can justify what Sam did. Darkfic, deathfic sort of


First Fanfic! I finally pulled myself out of my procrastination faze and voilà! Hope you like.

**Disclaimer: **I don't own Supernatural. Which is probably for the best – the show would be veeery angsty if I did.

'Why did you do it?' Dean asks. The question is aimed at Sam, even though it is directed at the bathroom door. Sam flinches. He doesn't want to have this conversation. Not now, not ever, because the answer isn't good enough. _No answer_ is good enough, because nothing can justify what Sam did. He knows that now, has come to realise it over the past few weeks. So instead of being all "Sam-ish" and spilling his guts out, Sam turns away from his brother and stares at the bathroom door. Doors are much easier to look at, Sam thinks, because they show no emotions. They have no gut-wrenchingly pained eyes to judge Sam with. Unlike Dean. Dean's eyes are like bottomless pits now, they no longer sparkle when they fix on Sam (or on anything for that matter). They just _judgejudgejudge. _And Sam can't bare that, because Sam knows that the judgement in Dean's eyes comes from the fact that Dean is suffering. Dean always hides his pain behind something else (at least that hasn't changed) but Sam can see right through it, and so he knows that the judgement he sees in Dean's eyes is in actual fact pain. Sam hates to see Dean suffer, especially when he knows that he can't fix it with a band-aid and a quick hug, so he just doesn't look at his brother anymore.

Not that Winchester woes were ever fixed with '_a band-aid and a quick hug_', Sam muses. A few hurried stitches and a quick pat on the back (if Dean was doing the fixing) were always seen to do the trick. Bedside manners à la Winchester. Sam used to hate that: the lack of compassion. _Used to _being the right term, because right now he would give an arm and a leg to have things back to the way they were before. _You want what you can't have, _Sam thinks. He huffs out air, and is horrified when he realises that this huff is as close to a laugh as he will ever get for the rest of his life.

He sticks his hands in his pockets, and curls them into fists. He feels his nails digging into the soft flesh of his palms – a not entirely painless feeling – but he doesn't stop digging and he doesn't uncurl his fists. Instead, he finds himself hoping that he'll hurt himself enough to get an adrenaline rush – the body's coping mechanism. Then maybe he'll have the strength to turn around and face Dean and his Goddamn pleading, desperate eyes. Obviously pinching doesn't cut it, even though Sam is pretty sure that he is drawing blood at this point because of how hard he is digging his nails into his thigh, and no adrenaline rush comes. Even so, Sam realises that he can't spend the rest of eternity staring at a fucking bathroom door, and so he rolls his eyes up to the ceiling, stares at the lamp for a few seconds, then turns around to face Dean – who is no longer there. Sam experiences a brief moment of panic, _how could I not have heard the door open? What if he's taken the Impala? He could be miles away now, you complete fuckwit,_ until he realises that Dean can't have taken the Impala – he can't even have left the motel room. Because ghosts are bound to the places where they were killed, _you know that Sam. _ So Sam walks over to his bed, sits down on the crumpled sheets, and waits.

He doesn't have to wait too long: two minutes and 28 seconds later (he counted. Nothing else to do) Dean is back. Sam knows Dean is back, even though he can't see him, _he's probably standing behind me_, because the temperature drops: just like it always does when ghosts come out to play. Sam knows that too.

'Where do you go when you do that?' Sam asks, following Dean's suit and addressing the bathroom door instead of his brother. He doesn't want to look at Dean, not yet. He knows what he's going to see reflected in Dean's eyes, because Dean only seems to be capable of two emotions now: sadness and fear.

Fear of Sam.

Sam can hear Dean shuffling behind him, and imagines him shifting from one foot to the other. Then Dean clears his throat, shuffles some more. Then he says, almost inaudibly (everything about Dean since his death, his _murder,_ appears to have gone on mute) 'I wasn't trying to go anywhere. I can't control it, Sam', and Sam's already broken heart (_do I even have a heart, _he thinks) breaks into even smaller pieces, microscopic ones, because Dean sounds so heartbroken, so lost, and Dean is never, _ever _lost. Then Sam realises that Dean called him Sam and not Sammy, just like he has been doing for weeks now, and despite his hate for the nickname, Sam realises that he would do anything to hear it come out of Dean's mouth again. _You want what you can't have. _He also knows that if Dean begins to call him Samuel, like their dad used to, he will end himself on the spot.

Suddenly there is no air. Sam can feel Dean's accusing eyes boring into his back, and he thinks about the expression 'burning holes through his back' and finds himself wondering if that expression applies to Dean – whether his brother could actually do that; burn holes through flesh using his eyes, seeing as he is a supernatural being (_notmonsterrnotmonster_) now. _Thanks to me_, thinks Sam, and it's that thought that propels him out of his stupor on the bed, out the motel-room door, across the parking lot and into the Impala, where he sits still for a while, breathing in the familiar scent of leather and Dean (pre-death) that still remains, until images of his brother dying in that fucking motel that he can see out of the rear-view mirror assault him, and he realises that he has to leave. And so he does.

He drives for about two hours straight, through a landscape that is just as dead as he feels (just as dead as Dean actually _is_), until he reaches a lookout point. There are two weather-beaten benches perched precariously on the edge of the cliff and Sam gets out and sits down. And finally feels like he can breathe again. Until…

'Why did you do it?' Dean is there all of a sudden, right next to Sam. Sam jumps, his heart beats faster. But he should be used to this by now, Dean appearing at Sam's side out of thin air, wherever Sam is. Another thing with ghosts: they aren't just bound to the places where they were killed. Sometimes they are bound to the people who killed them. Sam is always going to have Dean by his side now - just like he wanted. Mission accomplished. Except Sam _doesn't _want that anymore, he _doesn't want_ his brother hovering around him all the time; and again he thinks: _You want what you can't have._ Sam eyes Dean wearily out of the corner of his eye, sees the blood trickling down Dean's temple, into his eyes, down his throat. When Sam's eyes catch sight of Dean's amulet, coated in blood, he snaps them away quickly.

'I didn't want to be alone again' Sam mumbles, his voice hoarse. He can feel tears welling up, but he doesn't have the right to cry, doesn't have the right to do anything really, because he bashed his brother's head in with a gun. It had to be violent. He would have preferred poisoning, something less…traumatic, but people usually only come back as ghosts when they have died violent deaths. So death by battering it was. That won out over shooting, because Sam didn't want to have to look at a Dean with a bullet wound in his head for the rest of his life. 'It was the only way to make sure that you'd never leave'. He doesn't look at Dean, just like he hasn't really looked at Dean since the day that he killed him in the Everglade motel. Their new home. Instead, he stares ahead at the horizon, at the setting sun and the vast space of nothingness that stretches out before him and his ghost of a brother (literally), and thinks that he would like Dean to slap him on the back, give him his shit-eating grin and call him a girl because he is looking at nature and _'men don't look at nature, Samantha'_. He used to hate when Dean called him Samantha, but you want what you can't have and right now, all Sam wants is for his brother to poke fun at him. But he knows that Dean's hand would just go right through him, and that Dean is incapable of smiling because Dean was killed by his little brother. And Sam realises that he's still alone and always will be.

Please review! If you get a kick out of flaming, then go ahead. Won't be read though.

SC


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